Brains in a vat
Yeah, today was one of those days that I felt like my brain was in a vat. I'm actually getting lots of things done; should have some very interesting good news coming out soon on the professional front, but I can't talk about it yet. At the same time, other parts of my life feel like I'm pushing through molasses. C'est la vie. At least we have good comics still around.
November is coming sooner than we think.
LaDuke"s first post
I clearly don't have my priorities organized. How will I find time for blogging? Will Jabber pull me over the line? Is the world ready for this?
Dave LaDuke is now checking out Snippets
Dave LaDuke, illustrious CEO of Sputnik is getting an introduction to the power of Jabber-based blogging.
Ed Cone: Coble needs to rethink digital vigilante bill
In an excellent column in the News-Record, Ed Cone puts Rep Howard Coble to task on his support for the Berman-Coble bill, which will allow the big media companies to attack and disable any computer system that they believe has illegally-gotten copyrighted material.
He further discusses the potential of newly-found political power from folks on the internet who are contributing to defeat candidates, like Coble's opponent, Tara Grubb.
In the end is a pleas for sanity:
Copyright protection is a serious issue, but enforcement shouldn't overly empower an entertainment industry that has a history of resisting new technologies from television to the VCR. My hope is that Coble, who two years ago reversed his stance on work-for-hire rules for musicians when an industry-backed bill he supported came under fire, will live up to his reputation for fairness and emerge as a champion of individual liberty. Fixing the digital vigilante bill would be a great place to start.
Getting Evolution to spell check with Debian
Just a quick tech note that will hopefully get picked up by Google, a message in a bottle, so to speak.
I used to have problems getting spell checking to work correctly with Ximian Evolution. The problem was that Debian needs a default dictionary to perform spellchecking. Here's the packages you need: aspellgnome-spell (replaces pspell)
ispell The kicker is that you also need some DICTIONARIES. For us americans, make sure that you also install: aspell-en
iamerican So, you can get it all by doing: apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install evolution aspell ispell gnome-spell aspell-en iamerican Evolution should now auto-spell check your email!
Showing the system off to Alf
Alf Watt is over here and I'm giving him a quick look at the engine behind the Snippets daemon. I can boldface, underline and do whatever else I want. It will take any HTML I want.
Change the face of blogging?
Think what it would be like to have an interactive publish/subscribe mechanism for blogs You'd be notified immediately whenever anyone updated an entry that you had commented on, on any blog, anywhere. You could then respond with an IM,and it would simultaneously get posted to the blog and also sent out to all the people (including the original poster and commenters) for a discussion to develop.
Web Services, Blogs, and IM - interesting, fertile territory.The script to post these blogs
I've put up a somewhat sanitized version of the script I use to post entries to this blog via jabber. It is a perl script using the Net::Jabber modules and the Net::Blogger modules. It should be pretty easy to set up for your own blog:
- Get all the modules and install them
- Create a new jabber user at your favorite Jabber server (like jabber.com)
- Put that user's JabberID and password into the script
- Figure out what BlogID to which you'll be publishing
- Put in your Blog username, passowrd, and BlogID into the script
- Run the script(it doesn't have to be run on your webserver, it can be anywhere)
- Add the new jabber user to your buddy list - it will immediately ask to put you on its buddy list.
- Send messages to the new "buddy"! You'll be posting to your blog.
I've also been experimenting with an intersection of the blog space and IM - go check out Experimental Conversations. You can try out the interface and participate in the conversation by adding conversations@jabber.sputnik.com to your buddy list. Then go ahead and send it messages! You can change the subject of the conversation by sending a full-fledged message with a subject, or you can participate in the conversation by just opening up a chat window and typing. Of course, don't forget to refresh your browser window every now and then!
Imagine if you had this facility going directly to an intranet page - something semi-private. The auto-logging of conversations is wonderful, and the potential for knowledge management and capture is huge. Of course, it isn't the best interface for truly interactive discussions (f2f or voice or even IM/IRC is better for that) but this way you can easily add notes to a document collection, for example, or make comments on a memo or document that you're passing around.
I think there are a lot of possibilities here.
Blogged
Ack, Doc blogged me - here and here. He's brilliant, can't say enough about how smart, funny and charismatic he is... Ok enough of the brown nosing.
One of the things I really enjoy when speaking with Doc is that you always feel like you're right there in the thick of it - right at the cutting edge. Surfing the bow wave of the ship, feeling its spray.Good Outliner for Linux
Boy, it would be cool to have a good outliner for Linux - something better than Emacs Outliner-mode or GNOME-think. I liked the Outliner Doc used when he was over at my houe - It is the Manilla Outliner, I believe - an extension to MORE no doubt, but you need Radio or Frontier for it to work. I'd buy Radio if it was available for Linux.
Well, now that I'm using Jabber to post entries, I guess all I really need is a Jabber client with decent HTML support.Dave Winer explains weblogs
Dave Winer posts a great explanation of the economic reality behind the corporate adoption of weblogs:
There will come a day when there has been enough experimentation, and a CEO of a company that's not in software will have a weblog that makes a big difference in competition in a market that's not Internet-related. It could be the CEO of Ford Motor Company. Last week Steven Levy asked if I meant that Ken Lay would have a weblog. No, Ken Lay will not have one. But the next generation CEO will. His replacement will. Why? Because shareholders will demand it. Because there will be a competitive advantage to direct communication without middlemen.Good stuff.
Dan Gillmor gets it again
Dan Gillmor is at it again - writing a clear, cooncise piece of journalism about some of the silver lining in today's tech world, and it is about customerism rather than consumerism.
CUSTOMERS AWAKEN: Everyday people are starting to realize that they are not just ``consumers'' but customers -- that is, they are becoming serious participants in the marketplace of goods and services. This is a crucial distinction.Kudos, Dan.A consumer's role is limited to ordering what's on the menu and paying for it. A customer wonders what's not on the menu, asks for something he or she actually wants and then negotiates the terms.
This awakening takes many forms, but a common one is the customer's empowerment. Technology is the catalyst.
Prospective customers ignore press releases and product pitches. Instead, they are heading to Web sites where they can research the reality and see what current customers have to say.
Journalism organizations watch, mostly dumbfounded, as weblogs and other multidirectional media bring new voices to the conversation. They offer new choices to what I call the ``former audience,'' the people who are now becoming part of the journalism process itself -- to the ultimate benefit of everyone.
Even the all-powerful ``intellectual property'' regime is feeling the heat of customer-ism as opposed to consumerism. Customers are starting to understand that copyright owners are stealing customers' rights -- legal and traditional -- with laws and software designed to capture absolute control over distribution of music, movies and, I fear, even words.
But they keep overreaching. They're stifling speech, threatening research and scholarship in addition to curbing customers' ability to make personal use of what they've bought. And in the process they're poking what I believe -- I hope -- is a slumbering giant.
The Browser sucks as a web services client
It is TOTALLY the wrong app to do things like input text, jeez.
Prior Art?
I wonder if anyone else has done this before. Looks like here's someone who created something using the Blogger XML-RPC interface. Dave Winer and his Radio team have put together a new tcp.im interface as well, which incorporates textresponder functionality, but I think my interface is cleaner. I don't need tocontrol the entire operation of my site through IM - just a 1-to-1 mapping is best - the Subject line becomes the title of the entry, and the message is the text. No subject line, the entry has no subject, and it reads like an extension of the previous entry.
I have thought about redoing the code in the Blogger API and XML-RPC - this would remove the Movable-Type-specific nature of the code and would mean that anyone could post to their blog via IM. Oh interesting, there is a project on jabber.org called Jogger, subtitled, "a Jabber powered weblog". - I guess it is a proof of concept, because it is listed as more of a service to allow you to post to the jogger server... Cool to see all these projects out there; I'll have to release mine up on the world soon.